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	Lost in a Moral Maze Sunday Business Post March 21, 2010 http://www.sbpost.ie/commentandanalysis/lost-in-a-moral-maze-48113.html IRELAND -- In the late 1960s, the Catholic Church positioned sexual morality at the heart of its authority - a decision that is now coming back to haunt it, writes Padraic Conway. There are few who could have been left unmoved by the events of the past week pertaining to Cardinal Sean Brady's conversations of 1975 with children abused by the late Fr Brendan Smyth. What is striking about this case, compared even to the equally heartfelt reaction to the Ryan and Murphy reports, is the level of disappointment and anger expressed by what we might call "mainstream" or "silent majority" Catholics. Yesterday's Pastoral Letter of Pope Benedict XVI to the Catholics of Ireland is of undoubted significance, the fullness of which may take some time to emerge. His call for "decisive action carried out with complete honesty and transparency" as the only way to "restore the respect and good will of the Irish people towards the Church" has the ring of accuracy and truth. One hopes that this letter will indeed be a spur to action and not, as with so many other Roman interventions, a de facto disempowering of the local church. To discover the source of much of our current distress, it is necessary to recall an earlier Papal initiative. For many such people, whose access to ecclesial pulpit or media microphone is slim to none, last week was a watershed - but a watershed with a history. On July 25,1968, Pope Paul VI issued the encyclical Humanae Vitae which reaffirmed traditional Catholic teaching on matters of sexual morality - but did a lot more besides. As the years and decades unfolded, it came to be seen as the paradigm of a Vatican stance which promoted an authoritarian viewpoint, not just on sex, but on everything. The topics addressed by this 1968 encyclical had been taken off the table at the Second Vatican Council by Pope Paul VI. Instead, they had been referred to the Pontifical Commission on Birth Control. This multidisciplinary commission, made up of clergy and laity, was established by Pope John XXIII in 1963, but was greatly expanded by Pope Paul to a membership of 72 by the time it issued its report in 1966. This report stated that artificial birth control was not intrinsically evil, and that Catholic married couples should be allowed to decide for themselves about their preferred method of family planning. It is difficult to overestimate the shock experienced - and not just throughout the Catholic world - when the encyclical was issued in the form that it was. Most shocking of all was the way in which the Vatican II idea and ideal of the Church as the People of God - and not primarily a clerical hierarchy - had, to use a metaphor appropriate for Cheltenham week, fallen at the first fence. The greatest damage done by Humanae Vitae was to the moral authority of the Catholic Church itself. Paul VI chose to ignore both the collegial process instituted by his predecessor and its output. Instead, by making the minutiae of sexual morality a test-case of authority, and therefore power, the clerical-institutional Church sowed the seeds of its own destruction - a destruction we are witnessing on an almost daily basis now. "The bishops stopped preaching about contraception when their married sisters told them to cop themselves on." This demotic but memorable phrase, uttered tome over a decade ago by a leading Catholic layperson, captures a lot of what was the lived reality for many, if not most, Catholics post-Humanae Vitae: they simply ignored it. In fact, what emerged after July 1968 bore a striking resemblance to the realpolitik of "spheres of influence", which then held sway on the international stage. The Pope had his sphere of influence, which was not to be denied to him - but its circumference had only a tangential relationship to the bedroom door. Beneath the silence, however, was a latent anger at the arrogance of a hierarchy that had attempted to impose such an intrusive and farcical solution. Much of this had its roots in a pre-Vatican II Ireland where the arrogation of power by a clerical Church, with the collusion of all the relevant state entities, led to such a vesting of power and status in the clergy that, when issues arose, people were most often either unaware of their rights or felt so disempowered that they could not assert them.The anger at this abuse of power would reach its full consummation in the light of subsequent revelations about clerical sexual abuse. Internationally, the German and Dutch bishops issued encyclicals after Humanae Vitae's publication in 1968.These stressed the importance for all Catholics of taking the encyclical seriously as authoritative Church teaching, but stressed equally the right, indeed the necessity, for each individual of making a free decision of conscience in relation to family planning and birth control, once their conscience was properly informed. This action by such powerful episcopal conferences goes a long way to explaining the focus of the Wojtyla-Ratzinger Vatican on ensuring that only men who were sound on the Humanae Vitae question were appointed to key bishoprics. At the same time, Ratzinger's Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith was quietly blurring the distinction between infallible and non-infallible teaching. Imperceptibly, to condone the use of a condom had become virtually equivalent to denying the resurrection - and certainly in terms of ecclesiastical career prospects. Vatican II in its Decree on Ecumenism had explicitly acknowledged a "hierarchy of truths", whereby some truths are seen to be more foundational than others. Now the hierarchy of truths has gone the way of the model of the Church as the "People of God". While initial appearances may have flattered to deceive, however, the robust and uncompromising institution built up by John Paul II and Ratzinger is now seen to have been more of a house of cards. Nowhere is this reality more apparent than in Ireland. As soon as the phenomenon of clerical abuse and its prevalence became matters of public knowledge, the latent anger felt by many became a volcano. It is not to defend or excuse Cardinal Brady's inaction in 1975t o suggest that he is, in many ways, a collateral victim of this deep-rooted eruption of anger. It is little short of a personal tragedy that one whose attributes of decency, shyness and self-effacement to a fault are evident on even the briefest encounter should have his destiny bound up with a man like Brendan Smyth. Those same attributes, it is worth recalling, were of immense value in advancing the Northern Ireland peace process. Anger must have its day, nonetheless, and it may well be that the image of the leader of a perceived conspiracy interviewing two young children and swearing them to secrecy has become indelible in the public mind. It was a rich and not entirely tasteful irony, particularly when one reflects on how they filled their respective time in 1975,to hear Martin McGuinness call on Cardinal Brady to consider his position. Indeed, one wonders whether, if all those in senior positions in politics, the professions, business or the academy were called to account for their actions in 1975 and since in the same detail as Cardinal Brady, we might in the aftermath have an even greater over-supply of office space than at present. It may well be both premature and necessary to suggest that it is now time for the Catholic Church in Ireland to reflect on its raison d'e€tre: premature because one has to respect people's right to be angry and not attempt to run it to a stopwatch; necessary because, if the seeking after scapegoat clerical heads on plates becomes the objective, we are on the road to Salem, a road where truth will be an early casualty. While there is doubtless a small minority who feel untrammelled joy at what is now transpiring, for the most part what one feels coming through is a deep sense of disappointment that something fundamentally good has gone so badly wrong. If one suggests that healing and progress might begin by naming reconciliation as a defining objective, this is because, first, we are recalling the standard definition of reconciliation as the action of restoring estranged people or parties to friendship; the clerical leaders of Irish Catholicism have a lot of work to do to rebuild that friendship with the people of God in Ireland. Equally, we must learn the lesson of South Africa that the word 'reconciliation' is intimately linked with the word 'truth'; happy to live their own lives, even after Humanae Vitae, and see clerics as naive and limited in certain spheres, people became very angry when they felt they had been lied to and deceived. What a powerful gesture it would be if the Irish Catholic Church (or each individual bishop in his own diocese) were to commit to a Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Whether and in what specific form that might be more or less likely is a matter for further reflection and debate but it would certainly seem to be exactly the kind of decisive action called for in yesterday's pastoral letter. What is clear, however, is that the key question for Cardinal Brady - but, emphatically, not just for him - is whether he is more likely to be a facilitator or an inhibitor of reconciliation. Much hinges on the honesty with which this question is addressed and answered by the collective leadership of Irish Catholicism. Dr Padraic Conway is director of the UCD International Centre for Newman Studies, and a vice president of the university. He is currently directing the government-funded project, John Henry Newman: Global and Local Theologian
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